


Three Deaths

by glorious_spoon



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8148887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Three ways it could have gone for Jack, Peggy, and Daniel, and how it went instead. Inspired by this prompt.





	

1\. To the heart.

He opens the door and sees the man with the gun.

For an instant, it’s like looking into a funhouse mirror. The man is his height, his build, his hair a few shades darker; but for a few details, he could be Jack’s sibling. And maybe it’s that, more than the gun, that makes him rock back on his feet. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.

The bullet that would have passed through his right lung and shattered his scapula, necessitating three emergency surgeries and months of excruciating physical therapy, hits six inches to the left instead.

He isn’t even really conscious of the pain, only the impact. His world tilts and fades, like he’s falling from a great height.

The carpet fibers are rough beneath his cheek, and he can smell the cigarette smoke that’s sunk into them over decades of use.

He can see the polished black curve of his assailant’s shoe, the stitched leather inches from his eyes.

He feels cold.

And then: nothing.

(Five minutes from now, a maid will knock on the door and find it open, with a rifled-through suitcase and the body of one John Kensington “Jack” Thompson sprawled on the floor with his eyes open and an expression of faint surprise on his face. She will scream and run down to the front desk, where the receptionist will call the police, and the police will, eventually, notify the SSR.

Daniel Sousa will not be in his office when the call comes in. He’ll be walking Peggy Carter down to her car, smiling and chatting idly about potential dinner plans, suffused with warmth and a sense of rightness in the world. Neither of them will realize that something has gone terribly wrong until they get to the lobby and find Rose standing like a statue beside her desk with the phone pressed to her ear and tears running down her face.

The assassin will never be found.)

* * *

  _Or:_

_In another world, the assassin’s bullet maims but does not kill. Jack does not wake up when the maid comes in and screams, does not wake up in the ambulance, does not wake up, in fact, until three days later when Peggy Carter, tired and worried and sick to death of standing guard over a man who might never open his eyes again, sits beside his bed and berates him for five minutes straight._

_He tells her to shut the hell up, because he’s trying to sleep._

_She calls him a wanker and kisses his cheek._

_She does not cry until she’s very certain that he’s asleep again, and then she fixes her makeup and goes to phone the L.A. headquarters of the SSR._

* * *

 2\. Steel and blood.

Peggy is unconscious by the time they get her in the car, and the blood will not stop, it’s spilling through his fingers, black as ink in the dim light, soaking his trousers and his shirt and the car seat until it’s like he’s swimming in it, like Bastogne all over again—

It’s the first time he’s ever had her in his arms, and he’s trying hold her body together with his bare hands.

Jarvis knows the city like the back of his hand, and he’s got a good butler’s knack for deciphering the requirements of incoherent, highly distracted people. When Peggy’s heart stops three blocks away from Violet’s house, he understands perfectly what is required when Daniel mutters, “No, no, God, please no— Peggy— fucking don’t—”

He turns the car around and drives straight to the hospital. He helps Daniel unload her limp form from the backseat with a white face and trembling hands and no regard for his bespoke suit, and all but sprints into the emergency room with her.

The bleeding is slowing to a trickle by the time they deliver her to the doctors, but it’s too late.

She dies on the operating table.

(Three hours from now, Violet will come home to see her fiance sitting on her front steps, white-faced and soaked with blood.

She will not scream. She’s a nurse, and she understands the importance of triage. She’ll run up the steps with her heart beating fit to burst and say his name again and again to no response.

He’s uninjured; the blood isn’t his. She’ll feel horribly guilty for being so relieved, and feel worse when she sits down beside him, shakes his shoulder—urgent, but no longer quite so panicked—and says, “Daniel, what happened?”

She’ll feel worse, because he’ll tilt against her like a puppet whose strings have been cut, and his breath will shudder in his chest, and then he’ll be crying like she’s never seen a man cry, like she didn’t even think a person _could_ cry. Like it might shake him to pieces, and it goes on and on and doesn’t seem to end.

She’ll get most of the story later, when a stone-faced Jack Thompson turns up for a meeting with Daniel that seems to wind up being half-interrogation, half-shouting match.

She’ll figure out enough to realize just who Peggy Carter was to him, but it’s not like that makes any difference now.

She loves him, and she’ll marry him, even if it means spending the rest of her life playing second-fiddle to a ghost.)

* * *

_Or:_

_Peggy is young and strong and Violet is very good at her job. She gets the bleeding stopped in time. She breaks up with Daniel. She feels pretty bad about it, seeing how hurt he is, but not bad enough to take him back._

_Two weeks after Whitney Frost’s disappearance, she finds him sitting outside a hospital room with his crutch leaned against the wall, looking exhausted. The man inside the room is sleeping; Daniel doesn’t look like he’s slept in a week._

_She brings him a cup of coffee, and sits down next to him, and asks if he’s okay._

_They wind up chatting until Peggy Carter turns up to take over guard duty from him, and the pair of them are so obvious about avoiding eye contact and biting down on their smiles that it’s pretty clear how that whole situation resolved itself._

_It stings a little, but there are other fish in the sea._

* * *

3\. The last battlefield.

It’s possible that he might have survived.

If he had access to modern medical facilities, if their medic hadn’t gotten his fool head blown off two days earlier, if he hadn’t spent most of a week lying in icy mud before the 2nd Armored Division broke through—

He might have survived. He would have certainly lost the leg, but he might have lived.

As it is, though, he starts hallucinating on the third day, after his mangled leg has started to rot and stink. They don’t have enough morphine, so they get two strong men to hold him down while the medic excises the diseased flesh, foregoing finesse for that old standby of battlefield surgery, brutal speed.

He doesn’t bleed out in the cold mud. He’s young and strong and he wants to live, and that’s almost enough.

Almost.

Daniel Sousa lives to see Christmas of 1944, and the liberation of Bastogne. He does not live to see 1945.

(It seems unlikely that his death will cause any ripples in the grand scheme of things. The only son of a Brooklyn dock worker, he should be an insignificant figure in the annals of history. His father will get a folded flag; his body will be buried in a trench with those of his comrades. He is no different from any other boy who died in the war.

A year from now, when Peggy Carter first walks through the doors of the New York SSR headquarters, she will find no allies there. This will not stop her. She’s accustomed to overwhelming odds. She will make them respect her, make them understand that she is a force to be reckoned with; she will ally briefly with another up-and-coming agent by the name of Jack Thompson, but the alliance will not survive their mutual distrust. They will never become friends.

Jack Thompson will become head of the SSR, will move on to the FBI when that wartime agency finally gives up the ghost, will ignore his twinges of conscience until he can no longer feel them at all. Someday, he'll sit down at a table with a man named Alexander Pierce, and smile, and agree to work together to build a better world.

Peggy Carter will spend her life opposing him. She will never marry.)

* * *

_Or:_

_In another world, he’s rescued before the gangrene starts to set in, and they manage to take the leg with no serious complications. He comes home on a medical transport, and his father meets him at the docks; it’s the first and only time Daniel has ever seen him cry._

_He applies for the open position at the SSR with no real expectation that he’ll get the job, and he never quite stops suspecting that pity or politics played some part of Dooley’s decision. Maybe that’s why he sees a kindred spirit in Peggy Carter; maybe it’s just that he’s still learning what it’s like to be dismissed and ignored and seen as useless. Peggy is much more accustomed to it._

_It’s easy to like her, even to love her; Jack Thompson takes far longer. It’s not until two years later, sitting in a California hospital and praying that the aggravating son of a bitch will just open his eyes already, that it occurs to Daniel to call him a friend._

_In another world, they have time to make things right._


End file.
